Guides7 min read
7 Days to Die: the server settings that decide your world
Region files, world size, zombie counts and the blood moon. Which settings cost performance, which cost nothing, and where a server usually falls over.
7 Days to Die keeps a voxel world that players are actively destroying, which is a harder problem than it looks. The settings that matter for performance are the ones that decide how much of that world is awake at once, and the horde night is where every choice you made shows up in one go.
Blood moon is the load test
Everything is fine until night seven, when the zombie count multiplies across every player at once. If the server is going to fall over, it will do it then. Size for the horde and the rest of the week takes care of itself.
- BloodMoonEnemyCount is per player, not for the server. Four players at eight each is thirty-two.
- MaxSpawnedZombies caps the total, and is the setting that saves you.
- World size costs memory even where nobody is standing, because chunks near players stay loaded.
Region files and the slow corruption
The world is stored as region files, and a server killed mid-write can leave one damaged. The symptom is odd: a specific area that crashes clients who walk into it. Restore that region from a backup rather than the whole world, and stop the server properly rather than pulling the plug.